First of all: Suse 11.1, both installer and OS look great.
With a one drive straight forward install I got everything working right out of the box, including internet access without the need to set up anything at all.
Unfortunately I had a lot of trouble installing it with a RAID 1 array. To some extent I have a feeling what caused this. As I cannot point out the precise cause I can only give a few suggestions:
-
I had two disks in the array with a prior installation of Suse 10.3. Although I chose new install it the installer continues to configure based upon what is already there. Therefore, clean the disks first by either formatting them - or if that proves difficult just install Windows XP for a moment. Destroying and rebuilding the array, deleting and creating partitions, it is all not enough. You can spare yourself a lot of time by just cleaning them first.
-
I wanted to use Reiser. Now ended up with Ext3 and decided to go with that. Do not know if Reiser makes any difference, it just one factor I changed during the process. Initially preferred Reiser because of speed and good past experiences.
Final words: yes you can make a RAID 1 array on a P35 board with the Intel Matrix ICH9R controller chip.
Because it was difficult I also tried the software RAID. I have the feeling that the ICH9R approach takes some of the load of the processor.
